90% of CEOs Say AI Changed Nothing. The Other 10% Have a PR Team

austin-cheney

No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.

marstall

it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me. but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise. in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc. that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.

josefritzishere

Studies to date suggest an 18% productivity loss from AI use. I think we'are at the point where we can call it a scam.

zingababba

It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions. Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.

clay_the_ripper

in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it. people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.

BLKNSLVR

The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI. Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass. If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame. I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time. All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI! I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.

chaudharyt

Some parts of the article makes me feel that it too, is AI generated. Just a smell. "They’re reporting feelings, not findings." "That’s not measurement. That’s decoration."

neversupervised

This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough. C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.

baggachipz

It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.

returnInfinity

Not true after Dec-Feb. Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 are real. If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more. So is this how we increase productivity? Who captures the value? For now looks like the chip makers and model makers.

sidcool

I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.

pupppet

I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?

Fannon

I'm not surprised if this is true to a wide degree (not fully). What the people that predicted that AI will change productivity drastically in just a year or two imho underestimate: Just because a technology is capable of this in theory (and I think it is, even today) - it doesn't mean we are willing or able to deploy it to its full potential at scale. There will be a few individuals and very few companies which will do so or come close. For most of the companies, they're still doing a lot of processes manually that could have been automated with 80s technology. Why should a change in the technology suddenly make everyone change their mindset, culture, way of thinking? This may take 1-2 generations to more fully form. Maybe that's also better: Slower change is less destablizing for society / individuals, I think of it more like a defensive mechanism of the system to keep it stable.